I DO NOT CLAIM TO HAVE WRITTEN A NOVEL about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, great and necessary American women as they continue to be. Although they are alive in every page of the book, they are no more its subject than Henry James, P. T. Barnum, Herman Melville, Jacob Riis, or Alma Bridwell White, figures in Ellen Finch’s dream of late-nineteenth-century America. I wrote of the nightmare that was, and is, America for the disenfranchised and powerless. How better to describe it than from inside a febrile mind? Ellen saw through a glass darkly and knew it to be the truth. How better to portray race relations in America in her day and ours than as a minstrel show? The section headings “Overture,” “Cakewalk,” “Intermission,” “Olio,” and “One Last Shuffle & Good Night” are intended to suggest that detestable, but hugely popular, theatrical form of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, which did much to engrain racial stereotypes in the national consciousness.
I ask the pardon of students of, and activists in, the American woman’s movement for sometimes finding comedy where none was to be found. One of my purposes in writing the books of the American Novels series (American Follies is the seventh) is to humanize those who have left the turbulence of public and private life behind them and gone into the silence where great women and men can become mere reputations, legends, and sacred emblems. Humankind is best served by human beings—glorious and inglorious.
I have taken a novelist’s liberties with the biographer’s truth. For example, at the time of my story, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony were not in America. Also, while they worked on the early volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (aided by the radical suffragists Matilda Joslyn Gage and Ida Husted), they stayed at Mrs. Stanton’s home in Tenafly, New Jersey, and not in Murray Hill. I quoted from Stanton and Gage’s incendiary Woman’s Bible, which was not published until 1895 and resulted in the former’s being disavowed by many of her allies, who viewed the book as either a sacrilege or a distraction from the immediate business of obtaining rights for women. I allowed the two suffragists of my story greater familiarity than was the case; in public and even in their correspondence, Susan referred to Elizabeth as “Mrs. Stanton.” Frequently, I treated them as if their views on how the cause could be advanced were interchangeable; they were not.
Although I have occasionally brought forward or pushed back events in Mrs. Stanton’s and Miss Anthony’s lives, to my knowledge I have not referenced historical events that occurred after 1904, the year of Ellen Finch’s narration. There are two exceptions: The Klan did not adopt the white robe and hood until the second decade of the twentieth century, when D. W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation and the advent of mail-order catalogues standardized the image that has come down to the present day. (While writing the Memphis section, I had in mind Philip Guston’s Klansmen paintings.) As for the second exception, Alma Bridwell White, founder and bishop of the Pillar of Fire Church in Zarephath, New Jersey, was a zealot of the Klan during the 1920s and 1930s. (At that time, New Jersey had sixty thousand Klan members, more than Louisiana, Alabama, or Tennessee.)
In its telling, Ellen Finch’s story smacks more of Barnum and Mark Twain than Stanton and Anthony. Both of those men found a truth about our kind in the grotesque and the absurd. Ellen stumbled on it as the result of a postpartum infection following the birth of her son, Martin. (Whether he was stillborn or is a figment of Ellen’s imagination, I leave to the reader to decide.) Delirium is only another lens through which to view the world. What is seen and heard under its influence may have a dreadful significance—and truth—all its own.
In “The Solitude of Self,” the farewell address to the movement she helped to found, Mrs. Stanton posed this question: “Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?” Although it was meant to admonish men to respect woman’s sovereignty, we can, from our vantage, reply that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dared to take responsibility for disadvantaged human beings. We can only admire their courage and compassion.